by Peter Nealen
The fact was, it was getting down to time to shit or get off the pot, and I was running up against the problem that I had no idea if I really trusted Jorge or not. All I had was his story, a gruesome photo that could have come from any corner of this horror show, and his translation of what the presumed Fernandez was saying. It was a lot thinner than I liked my intel to be before I pulled the trigger.
But another look showed me that while they might have been on police vehicles, none of the shooters I could see, including the squad that was moving on foot beside the DN-XI toward the gate, were wearing uniforms, or at least not complete ones. They were well armed, with G3s and M-16s, but they were definitely in civvies. That eased me a little bit more towards accepting Jorge's version of events. Unfortunately, there wasn't time to weigh all the options or possibilities.
Still, I hesitated. Jorge was getting more agitated. “Do something!” he hissed. “Before they sweep in here and kill us all!”
Fernandez' yelling was getting louder and more shrill. It was suddenly punctuated by a burst of automatic weapons fire that went overhead with a loud, ripping series of cracks. That did it. Regardless of the actual situation, we were under fire, so we reacted.
I rolled up onto a knee, my rifle swinging up to draw level with the DN-XI as I moved. Even with the magnification turned down, Fernandez' head was huge in the scope; he was barely fifteen meters away. I breathed out as I came upright, took a fraction of a second to stabilize, and squeezed the trigger.
Another one of Fernandez' cronies was blasting away into the air as I fired—whether he was trying to intimidate or actually attack I don't know. But his fire masked the sound of my shot, at least until Fernandez fell silent mid-word, dropping the megaphone with a squeal of static, blood and brain matter splashed across the side of the armored truck.
They didn't break, as much as I'd been hoping that knocking Fernandez out might have accomplished that. I'd seen Somali militias and ISIS units alike go to pieces when their commander was killed. Fernandez' gunmen tried to attack instead. A storm of fire rattled at the building, though most of it was either high or aimed at the ground floor; they still weren't sure where the kill shot had come from.
Beside me, Derek and Little Bob also rose up, getting into low kneeling positions and opening fire. Jorge even popped up—albeit a little too high—over the parapet and leveled his pistol, cranking off round after round at the attacking gunmen, the bark of his 9mm rounds drowned out by the thunder of our rifles.
I shot the first gunman trying to run in through the gate, catching him high in the chest. He staggered and fell, tangling the legs of the man behind him, who took two rounds from either Derek or Little Bob. Maybe both. We were so close, and they were packed tightly enough together, that we just poured fire into the gate, reasonably certain of hitting someone without having to worry about being too precise in our aim. I shifted fire briefly to the remote turret on the armored truck, hammering five or six rounds into it, until I was fairly sure it had been reduced to unusable scrap, then went back to killing.
There wasn't much left to do. About ten bodies were piled in loose-limbed, bloodied heaps in the gateway, and the rest were melting away. Two blue-and-white pickups accelerated past the gate, the gunners in the beds hanging on to their machinegun mounts for dear life. The DN-XI reversed away from the gate, turned, and roared off.
The whole fight had lasted maybe thirty seconds. It was probably one of the shortest, most anti-climactic firefights I'd ever been through.
Jorge had a decent-sized dossier on Ernesto Valladares. In addition to photos, there were established links to two more companies associated with Alonzo Reyes, along with ties to known Sinaloa Cartel personalities going back ten years, some of the CJNG, several high-profile Mexican and American politicians, two known FARC commanders, who were still at large as far as anyone knew, and several people whose faces in surveillance photos were circled with question marks. I studied them closely, looking for anyone who might be El Duque, but there wasn't anyone who was a slam-dunk match to the description, or the shitty pictures of him that we had to work with.
There were also addresses and maps for at least three of Ernesto's known hangouts; two of which were apparently clean, and one at which he'd met with the FARC commanders. Jorge hadn't been kidding when he said he had plenty of info on Ernesto, and he was more than forthcoming with all of it.
As soon as we'd gotten back downstairs, I'd gotten on comms to Jack and Nick. “Anarchy, Key-Lock, this is Hillbilly.” I had to send a couple more times before Nick finally replied.
“Hillbilly, go for Key-Lock.” I breathed a faint sigh of relief. I hadn't liked leaving those guys in the breeze, regardless of the fact that we hadn't had a choice in the matter, and hearing from them meant my fears that they would get rolled up by someone with a lot more numbers and firepower were allayed.
“Status and location,” I sent.
He rattled off a grid. “We are in a hasty hide site overlooking Guadalupe,” he explained. “We have eyes on Ernesto's bolt-hole. It's a villa at the foot of the mesa; heavy security. Suggest approaching for linkup from the mesa top, to the west.”
“Roger,” I replied. “We are secure, and on our way to you.” I'd looked at Jorge as I lowered the handset. “We'll need those Suburbans we were driving when you rolled us up.”
He nodded. “The other three men,” he said, pointing toward the cell block where Harold, Bugs, and the other driver whose name I couldn't remember were still holed up. “They are going with you?”
I shook my head. “They are not trained for this part,” I said. “Can you take care of them?”
He nodded, his expression turning hard. “They will be well taken care of,” he said coldly, “provided they provide information about what their employers are doing dealing with Los Hijos.”
“I don't think they really know,” I told him. “You can ask, but I'm fairly certain they're only pawns. They weren't told, and they didn't ask.”
“We shall see,” he replied. I felt a brief pang of sympathy for Harold, tempered by the fact that he hadn't asked any questions when there were so many red flags on this trip. Life wasn't going to be easy for him for a while.
We mounted up and headed out of town, after getting detailed directions from Jorge as to which neighborhoods and stretches of road to avoid. The Suburbans were going to stand out a little, but not as much as they would have in Iraq. We were going to cache them well short of the objective, anyway, and proceed on foot.
The first phase was over. It was time to go on the hunt in earnest. As we drove out of Zacatecas in the deepening dusk, I couldn't help but be glad of that fact.
Chapter 9
Just like old times.
The majority of our operations in recent years had been either urban or mobile. We were either tied to vehicles, sneaking through streets and alleys, or a combination of both. We still trained green-side, but it had felt a little like an afterthought; not many of our prospective targets were hiding out in the woods these days. Urban guerrillas or bad guys setting up their headquarters in towns were the order of the day.
As I lay in the dirt under a bush, propped up on my elbows and peering at the house below us through the light-enhancing scope on one of our two suppressed TRG-42 sniper rifles, I was very, very glad we hadn't abandoned training in long movements over rough terrain, hide sites, and the basics of reconnaissance and rural patrolling. Our target, while well within sight of the lights of Guadalupe, was most definitely not in town. We'd cached the Suburbans at the base of the hills and humped our way two and a half miles over the ridge to the vicinity of Jack's and Nick's observation post. The kit bags we'd carried most of the gear in hadn't made the best rucksacks, and I was sure my back was going to be punishing me for that movement soon enough, but they'd served. Trying to leave the assault kit behind wouldn't have worked; we were going to go straight from conducting recon into the actual raid. It was the kind of mission I would have killed for back
in the day.
There were enough trees around the ranch house to obscure a lot, but we had a decent view, nonetheless, through the narrow window that Jack and Nick had bored through the brush on the hillside. I could certainly see the two men on the rooftop well enough. Even in the dark, with the targets back-lit by Guadalupe itself, and just over five hundred meters away, I could see their plate-carriers, rifles, helmets, and NVGs. They were alert, too. These guys were professionals.
I scanned downward, picking out at least one more by movement alone in the shadows under the trees. There wasn't a lot of space between the trees that lined the entrance road and the whitewashed walls of the house itself. The guard was momentarily silhouetted against the wall as he moved; if I hadn't been looking straight at him, I probably wouldn't have seen him. There was too much light pollution from the town, and the moon wasn't up. A moment later, as I focused in, I saw his buddy.
“I count two on the rooftop, four rovers, and two on the porch,” Jack whispered over the radio, from the OP that he and Nick had set up, about ninety degrees offset from this one. He had a view of the house's front porch that Larry and I didn't.
“Roger,” I replied. “Tally two on the rooftop, two on the porch, and four rovers.” This was one hell of an external security detachment. Ernesto was really concerned about getting hit while he was hiding out here. Probably with good reason. I knew how loyalties could shift in the kind of environment that Mexico had turned into, and if Zacatecas was the battleground that he'd said it was, he was constantly going to be at risk, as today's partners become tomorrow's rivals. Of course, from Jorge's dossier, we also knew that some of the other gray-side elements attached to Reyes' companies used the house as well, so some of the security was probably permanent, and had nothing to do with Ernesto personally.
Even as experienced and well-trained as we were, this was going to be one hell of a nut to crack. That many on the outside meant that there were going to be more on the inside. Getting into the house was a tough enough problem; a whole other laundry list of such problems would set in as soon as we breached. We wouldn't have a lot of time once the outer security went down to make entry, which generally precluded the kind of detailed on-site recon that I would have liked. We had no idea of the interior layout of the casa. I considered waiting until Ernesto tried to move and ambushing his vehicle. After all, we were on the hunt now. We could afford to be patient.
At the same time, we were limited by logistics. We had only so much in the way of manpower, and only so many routes we could cover. And if Ernesto was as rattled by the rapid disintegration of his operation in Zacatecas as I suspected he was, he might move soon, and be looking for an ambush when he did. Not only would his PSD be keyed up and ready for a fight, but they could very well evade us just by picking a route we weren't in position to cover.
I didn't think he knew we were there yet, or even that we were hunting him. For all he knew, we'd all been killed in the ambush back at the meeting site. But from what Jorge had told me, Ernesto wasn't much of one to take chances. He was a middle-manager, not a front-line sort of operator. That distaste for personal risk might very well work in our favor once we got our hands on him. We just had to get in there and get him before he acted on that caution and moved out of our reach.
I eased back from the loophole in the brush, and Derek worked his way forward to replace me. I'd moved up from the assault element's position to get a first-hand look. Jim was over with Jack and Nick, both to drop off some longer-ranged firepower and to get his own view of the target. It wasn't that we didn't trust our recon element; it was more that we were laying this shit on on the fly, and getting eyes on the real thing, especially when we were right there, was preferable to trying to build and brief a terrain model in the dark.
Moving as slowly and silently as I could, I worked my way back down into the little draw below the OP. It wasn't much of a draw, really; part of the hillside had slumped, leaving a narrow shelf of bare rock with more creosote bushes and cactus clumped above and below it. It formed a decent, if small, little forward position for the assault element.
Ben, Little Bob, Bryan, and Eric were crammed in there, their backs to the sheer rock side of the slump, their weapons trained outboard. We hadn't brought ballistic helmets, but the bump helmets provided a more comfortable mount for our NVGs than a Halo mount would. We weren't as bulked up as we would have been in the military; even if we hadn't had to lug the gear over the damned mountain, we still tended to go with light and streamlined, even if we didn't have as much ballistic protection as your average mil assaulter. We looked like a bunch of guys in jeans and hiking boots with plate carriers and rifles. Hell, the guards on the casa down there looked more “tacticool” than we did.
I didn't say a word as I slipped down onto the rocks. I'd wait for Jim to get back. Then we'd brief the plan, get final comm checks, and move down to the target.
Once he slid down with only a slight rattle of displaced rocks, I leaned over to Ben, who was still in the point position, and whispered the description of the objective and the route down to it. I described the fence we'd have to get over, the trees near the house, the roving guards, the roof guards, the wide open area between the fence and the house, and anything else I could think of that might be useful. Once he nodded, and could whisper back the high points, I turned to Little Bob and repeated the procedure.
We have a sign at the Ranch, just over the door to our team room. It says, “The saying, 'No plan survives contact with the enemy' is being overly optimistic. No plan survives the first step out the door. No matter how thoroughly you map out every step that must be taken, as soon as reality hits, that shit is fucked. Plan broad strokes, recon the shit out of your objective, disseminate information, and know how your teammates will handle problems. Fill, flow, and go. Thatisall.” I painted that sign shortly after getting home following the spectacularly fucked-up operation in East Africa. It summed up the way a lot of us thought, and has become the codification of the way we train and work.
The whispers made their way back up to me, with Jim's version of the recce, filling in a couple of blanks from the different perspective. I listened, read back, then passed it on to Ben. Finally, it was go time. I squeezed Ben's shoulder. He carefully got up, trying not to rattle the rocks as he did so, and slipped off down the hill, the creosote bushes brushing against his kit with a faint whisper. I gave him a few meters to get ahead, then flipped my NVGs down and followed.
I don't like moving through the bush on NVGs. There, I said it. Even though we'd traded up to PVS-15s from our old, one-tube 14s, so we had some depth perception, now there was no peripheral vision. You have to crane your head to check your flanks, and damned near put your chin on your chest to look at your feet. They provide an advantage, and one that none of us were willing to give up when the bad guys had the capability as well, but they can be a real pain in the ass. And no matter how comfortable the helmet, the fuckers will weigh down the front, and eventually give you a headache.
We had to move slowly. The terrain wasn't particularly bad, but it wasn't conducive to running down the hill without leaving a signature, either, and the movement would definitely give us away. This was going to stay a soft hit for as long as we could keep it that way. Stealth was the order of the night.
Have you ever tried to climb down a hill, quietly, with armor, helmet, NVGs, and rifle, while staying lower than the tops of the creosote bushes? And trying not to stab yourself on the cactus that is scattered on the hillside in the process? If you haven't, be thankful. It sucks. It took an hour and a half to move three hundred meters, and by the time we halted, only a few dozen meters from the fence, I was soaked in sweat, with the desert grit gathering in every joint and every fold of my clothes.
Ben raised a hand slowly to signal a halt, then sank to his belly in the dust, rifle pointed toward the casa. I took two more careful steps before getting down behind him, facing to my right. We'd been staying close; the brush was reasonably thi
ck on the hillside, and with the enemy having NVGs, flashing IR around to signal each other was a bad idea.
One by one, the other four assaulters moved in and got down, alternating directions so we had two rifles pointed to each side and one each forward and back. We were close enough to be able to reach out and touch each other to communicate.
Nick's voice whispered over my earpiece. “Hillbilly, Key-Lock. You've got two rovers fifteen meters in front of you. The other two are on the far end of the compound. Advise staying in place until they move on.”
I broke squelch twice to indicate that I'd heard and understood. That close to the bad guys, I didn't dare try anything more. We lay there, our sweat soaking into the dust and turning it to mud on our clothes, waiting as the guards moved past us. They got even closer; I saw one walk by only about ten feet away, almost close enough for Ben to reach out and touch. But he was on the other side of the fence, and wasn't looking at the ground; he was looking up, searching for anyone walking, not lying on their bellies. I suspected they didn't expect much activity on this side of the compound; any trouble they would be expecting would probably come from the direction of Guadalupe. Besides, by the time I saw him, he'd already passed us, and I was looking at the back of his helmeted head.
We lay there, waiting, as the rovers moved off. I strained my ears, carefully breathing through my mouth as quietly as possible, trying to hear their movement. Granted, my ears have taken such a battering from years of gunfire, helicopters, and explosions that I'm damned near legally deaf, but with practice, you can compensate, and start picking individual sounds out of the dull roar that is every moment, even when there's no sound outside your damaged ears. I could just make out the swish of the brush against their gear, and the occasional murmured bit of conversation in Spanish, just below the threshold where I could pick out words. When that faded, I squeezed Ben's ankle, then reached over to do the same for Bryan. Time to move.